


Promises, Promises (Explosions, Explosions)

by RandomBattlecry



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-16
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-02-25 14:09:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2624624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RandomBattlecry/pseuds/RandomBattlecry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“So put on your best eyebrows, and God save the Queen.” University AU in which Clara is the Doctor, and the Doctor is still kind of the Doctor, and kind of not, but he definitely isn’t Clara, no sir. Whouffaldi ensues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He’s putting sugar in his coffee when it happens. This process has been known to go on for a while— his sister claimed to have clocked him at three minutes, but his sister is prone to sibling-related hyperbole— and so he has only managed to dissolve three cubes when the ground starts to shake and, understandably, interrupts him. His lanky form sways for a second like a well-constructed skyscraper, and then he stumbles a step to the left, two steps to the right, and another half step that brings him back where he had started, albeit slightly turned around. He directs an interrogative glare at the counter.  


The girl behind it shrugs. “Don’t blame me for the earth, Professor,” she says. “I’m only a part-timer.”  


He turns the quizzical glare on his coffee instead. It isn’t that he’s unhappy with it—though it needs a little sweetening up, decidedly— it’s more that he isn’t entirely in control over who or what he glares at, these days. His face seems to be making its own decisions without any help from him. He’d tried a smile at young mother earlier in the week and set her attendant toddler to hysterical weeping.  


“Well, don’t let it happen again,” he says to the girl behind the counter of the café cart, with mock severity. It’s easier to be easy when he isn’t looking at people. She’s probably holding her hands up in surrender, too, but he can’t risk turning to check.  


“Right you are, Professor.”  


He’s tipped her well, he thinks, so probably she won’t mind too awfully much if he tries a smile on her on his way past. So he does; it doesn’t hurt to practice. But she’s turned away from him to clean the espresso machine, and that’s probably just as well.  


Out from under the cart’s canopy, he moves towards work, towards the morning lecture, towards what makes him need high-sugar-content and caffeine in the first place: students.  


None of them are there, though, and he supposes this shouldn’t seem like such a surprise. The batch he’s ended up with this year are not the most reliable lot, especially when it comes to timing. He often thinks he needs some sort of high-level training in dealing with young persons and their total lack of a realistic approach to scheduling. He’s certain that all of them are late because of either skateboarding or makeup application. Or possibly applying makeup while skateboarding, which just seems like asking for the accidental loss of an eye.  


The girl who runs in at this point looks as though it’s the makeup that’s been keeping her. Probably not the skateboarding, not with how her hair looks, loose and dark and flowing. She wears a dark purple suit that he thinks he saw once on David Bowie, and a skinny tie. She is very pretty, and very young. Her eyes are enormous enough to give him a faint sense of vertigo, as though he’s going to fall in.  


“Oh!” she says, and stops and stares at him. The vertigo intensifies. “I didn’t think anyone would be here.”  


“Well of course I’m here,” he says, gesturing to his blackboard, chalk between his fingers. “I’m lecturing this morning. Where else would I be?”  


“Erm,” she says, looking thoughtful, “hiding from the end times with the rest of the proles?”  


“Ah,” he says, understanding now, “you’re looking for Advanced Government. Two doors down. Professor Tucker will be waiting for you, I’m sure.”  


“Well, he won’t actually,” she says. “I don’t want him, and he isn’t there. And if I was looking for Advanced Government, Earth is hardly the planet I’d start with.” She laughs a bit at this, clearly not expecting him to get the joke but not the slightest bit concerned about seeming rude. He’s about to remonstrate but there’s a rumbling noise from afar off, and then a shaking, and his blackboard vibrates off the wall and snaps in half.  


“What in the seventh ring of hell—”  


She snaps her fingers. “Retro Theology. Three doors to the left.”  


He’s stabilizing himself on the desk. She’s still wearing the manic grin. And David Bowie’s suit, she hasn’t managed to lose that in the last few seconds, either. But suddenly she seems ready to get down to business, though he is at a loss as to which business she’s concerned with. She’s a student, and students are known for ridiculous pranks, but he doesn’t really think they’re capable of causing earthquakes.  


“Nothing for it,” she says, as the building shakes around them once more. A bit more subtly this time, though, from which he takes a glimmer of hope. “We’re going to have to run.”  


He is really, really opposed to the idea.  


“I’m really, really opposed to that idea.”  


“Really?” She goes wide-eyed. “Well, how do you feel about being squashed beneath several tons of bricks? Are you in favor of that? ‘Cause this building’s about to go, you know, and that’s where you’ll end up.”  


“How do you know the building’s about to—”  


There is nothing subtle about the shaking now. When it finally subsides, he gets up from underneath the desk, looking with hunted eyes up at the ceiling.  


“Right. Now.” She presses her hands together and points at him. “Are you physically capable of running?”  


He snaps at her, annoyed. “What do you think?”  


“I think you’re wasting time. You’re wasting time, and that’s one thing you’re running short on.” He flinches— does she mean his age? Or something more sinister, is this some sort of warning or a threat or— but she’s ignoring him. She grabs at his hand. “So put on your best eyebrows, and God save the Queen.”  


Tremors. Oh, the tremors. The earth is languishing in its pain, and he can feel it in the back of his teeth, can taste it with his liver. The earth has gut-rot, and none of this is right. She tugs him onwards, and he can hear things crashing behind him. The building. Is anyone dying? Has he lost any students? He can’t stop and look, she won’t let him.  


At the edge of his hearing, or maybe he isn’t hearing it at all, maybe it’s just in his head, maybe he can feel it through her skin and her hand in his—  


_T h e y ’ l l b e f i n e_   


He believes it. What choice does he have other than to believe it? She’s brought him outside now, and he’s trying to catch his breath, which is eluding him. He doubles over, puts his hands on his knees.  


She looks down at him quizzically.  


“Alright?” she says.  


He doesn’t even dignify that with an answer.  


Everyone is gone. The building has collapsed. She has brought them to the café cart, and she is behind the counter busily making herself a tea before he even realizes that she’s moved. She’s even found an apron to put on, to keep her pristine jacket from spots.  


“Where is everyone?” he manages.  


“Warp hole,” she says.  


“I don’t know what that means.”  


“I know.”  


He waits, but she’s busy with the tea things.  


“Well, are you going to tell me?”  


“Not at the moment. How do you think we escaped the building?”  


“We—” He pauses a moment and collects himself. “You told me to run, and you took my hand, and we got out before it collapsed.”  


“Oh, was that a run?” she says, raising her eyebrows.  


He grits his teeth. “No, it was a very fast walk.”  


“You run like a penguin.”  


“It was a very fast walk.”  


“Oh. You walk like a penguin, then.” She takes a speculative sip of her tea. “Come on, don’t be angry. You’re not a young man, this can’t be the first time in your life that you’ve heard it.”  


It isn’t. He grits his teeth anyway.  


“Well, don’t let it get about,” he says.  


“Why not?”  


“Well— look, don’t laugh, but there are people in this university that look up to me.” She’s laughing. “I said don’t laugh!”  


“Well, I can’t help it, can I? You said something funny, and I laughed. Isn’t that what you humans do?” Another sip of tea. His eyes narrow, sharpen, focus on her.  


“What,” he says. “What did you just say? What does that mean? ‘You humans.’”  


The guilty expression on her face feels like a little bit of a triumph in and of itself. “What?” she says, innocently.  


“You just said ‘you humans.’”  


“No I didn’t.”  


“Yes you did, just then.”  


“No, _you_ said ‘you humans.’ Just now.”  


“Only because I was quoting you!”  


“Oh really?” she says, airily. “What’s the matter, professor? Feel that you’re above all the rest of them, do you?”  


“Them,” he says. “There you go again. Exactly what is going on?”  


“Oh, nothing,” she says, demurely. “Only having tea and a chat about your penguin walk. You’re the one who insists on bringing it down to semantics.” She looks thoughtful. 

“Do you suppose you could do that quickly enough to get away from immediate danger?”  


“Why?” he says suspiciously. “Are you planning on putting me in immediate danger? I mean— again?”  


“I’m just exploring my prospects. Examining my options. I’ve been traveling alone for a while now, you know. I could use an extra pair of hands, and you definitely have those.”  


She’s eyeing his fingers now. He puts his hands behind his back, self-consciously.  


“Where is everyone?”  


“Told you. Warp hole.”  


“Tell me in a way I understand.”  


“Ah,” she says, “now we’re getting somewhere. Tea?” He shakes his head, and she shrugs. “Warp hole. I sent them somewhere out of the way, so no one gets hurt while I sort this out. Something’s causing all these earthquakes, and I need to find out what it is.”  


“So everyone’s fine, then?”  


“For the moment, yeah.” She looks at him. “Are you glaring at me? I really can’t tell.”  


“No— or, well, I don’t mean to. I probably mean to smile, or look relieved, or something. I’m sorry, my face is malfunctioning,” he says, _apologia apologia_ , he’ll never get away from it.  


“Is it?” She tilts her head to the side. “I think it’s quite a nice face. I would like to see it, oh, ten or so years ago. Have you angry, maybe quite shouty. Ordering people around and running about like a penguin. I’ll have to put that on my list.”  


“What list?” He likes her voice. Even though she’s done nothing but insult him since they met three minutes ago. Well, insult him and save his life, simultaneously. So obviously she’s quite talented, as well as pretty. And her voice is soft, and her hands are warm.  


“List of one hundred and one places to visit, of course,” she says. “You should be flattered that you rate it. I mean, so far, it’s just you ten years ago and Marcus Aurelius.”  


“I don’t understand you.” But he understands enough to be blushing, slightly.  


“That’s alright,” she says quickly, “no one does, not even me, you shouldn’t beat yourself up about it.”  


Then the tremors again— this time without even a rumble to warn them— and the earth shakes and shakes itself as though it is a very wet dog, or as though there is something on its back and it is trying to remove it. A very determined something. He stumbles sideways, and she stumbles sideways, and they collide impossibly somewhere in the middle, and she has turned him somehow so when they go down he lands on top of her, and she’s all soft and lovely in her little jacket, and if it weren’t for the fact that he thinks she probably was trying to protect him from breaking a hip or something, he’d be quite turned on just now. Oh, who is he kidding.  


Lying on top of her, he thinks she has too many heart beats. She’s probably been collecting them for years, he thinks.  


He rolls half off of her but she grabs at his jacket.  


“Are those jelly babies in your pocket?” she says, her eyes on his.  


He bites his lip. He’s not going to say it. Nope. Absolutely not. No.  


“No, I’m just happy to see you,” he says, and groans at himself, swiping a hand over his face and wishing he could cut his tongue out, something, anything. Dirty old man, she’s thinking now, probably, though in reality it’s just that his mouth runs away with him.  


But she laughs.  


She laughs, and he stares at her.  


“No, really though,” she says, “are they?” Her hand is in his pocket, and she’s finding out for herself, and of course they are. She pulls the packet out and sits up, and he subsides next to her and watches her examine the contents thoroughly. She takes one out, and bites its head off with enough ferocity that he has to wince and lick his lips simultaneously.  


“Who are you?” He sounds somewhat aghast, and somewhat admiring, and possibly far too lustful at the moment, but he’s in control of absolutely none of this, so he hopes she’ll forgive him and just pretend none of that had happened. But her soft eyes have grown keener, and she tilts her head to the side to look at him slightly askance.  


“Hmmm,” she says.  


He blinks rapidly.  


“I really do want to know,” he says, with a tad bit of apologia imbedded in the words.  


“Hmmm,” she says again, though she’s starting to smile, so maybe she’s looking past the ingrained admiration and lust, and maybe she does believe him after all. “I’m the Doctor.”  


He huffs out a slight breath, mouth open, and nods for a moment before it catches up with him that she hasn’t really told him anything at all. “Doctor who?” he says.  


“Exactly,” she says, and grins. “Anyway. Who’re you when you’re at home? Or not at home, either one. I’d like to know what to call you on holiday, too.”  


“Smith,” he says. “Professor John Smith.”  


She holds out a hand to him and he takes it. Her hands are tiny, impossibly tiny in his, and he thinks they must be made of steel. She shakes his hand solemnly.  


“I thought you must be. Glad to know you, Professor,” she says.  


“Pleasure’s all mine, Doctor,” he says.  


She stands up, depositing his jelly babies in the pocket of her coat. The pocket must be bigger on the inside, is all he can figure, because the coat is cut quite close and the packet doesn’t even make a bulge. “Right. Enough play time. Let’s get this sorted.”  


“Er,” he says. “Get what sorted, exactly.”  


“Mysterious earthquakes,” she says, “the earth shaking itself around like it’s got something on its back?” He blinks at her slowly. “You with your malfunctioning face. Come on. Nothing about this is normal. This isn’t California. Get up.” She holds out her hand, wriggles the fingers till he takes hold, and then pulls him up beside her with an ease that belies her size. She makes sure he’s stable, then starts off towards the blue police box he had utterly failed to notice earlier.  


He follows at a slight distance, still unsure of where she’s going, and even more uncertain of what she intends to do when she gets there.  


“C’mon,” she tosses over her shoulder, and pulls a key from a pocket. He stands behind her awkwardly as she unlocks the box and jiggles the handle a little. She turns to look at him and raises her eyebrows. “Are you coming?”  


“Ah,” he says. “Er.”  


“What?”  


“Well, I mean—” He gestures towards it, the whole tableau of it, biting at his lip. “It’s just a little box, isn’t it?”  


“Mm,” she says noncommittally. “So?”  


“So what will people say, you know, if they see a man and woman going into a small blue box together?”  


“Hmm.” She looks at the ground for a moment, contemplatively. “Apart from the fact that there’s really no one around to notice, I think they’ll say, Well done you two, enjoy yourselves, you’re only young once.”  


“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it?”  


“What’s just it?”  


“Young once. I mean, don’t you think they’ll notice?” The nonexistent people. He’s aware that he’s being ridiculous.  


“Notice what?”  


He tugs at his collar, uncomfortably. “Age difference. There is one, you know.”  


“Ah.” Her eyes flash and shine, and her dimples appear as if by magic. How does she do that? “I know. I really do. Believe me, Professor. If you’re okay with it, so am I.”  


She doesn’t seem to be lying. He watches her for a moment, just to be sure, then he throws his hands in the air.  


“Ah, what the hell,” he says, and advances to her side. His head is briefly full with visions of his younger self, tons of them, all inexplicably giving him thumbs up signals and huge skeevy grins full of capped teeth.  


But it isn’t what he’s thought, and it certainly isn’t what his lecherous younger self keeps trying to tell him, because the inside of the box is not like the outside. The inside of the box is something beautiful and otherworldly, there are things that turn and things that don’t turn and things that go up and down and big round things on the walls, and a leather arm chair that he would really very much like to sit down in for a moment, just to get his bearings. The Doctor is moving around the console in the middle, pulling levers and pressing buttons and humming to herself.  


“Welcome,” she says, “to my home away from home.”  


“This,” he says, “is.”  


She looks up at him for a moment.  


“Words fail you, I presume.”  


He nods.  


“Ah, I thought that might happen.” She bounces away from the console for a moment and hands him a Post-It. On it are a few complicated scribbles of interlocking circles and dots, and below it, it says _It’s bigger on the inside_. “Just, you know. In case you were wondering.”  


“What is it?” he manages at last.  


“Apart from bigger on the inside?” she prompts. “This is the TARDIS. Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. It’s my ship. My time ship. And space. My time and space ship. It travels in time. And space. Am I making myself clear?”  


“No,” he says.  


“Good,” says the Doctor, with some satisfaction, and directs her attention instead to the screens ranged around the console, ignoring him for the moment. He takes advantage of the leather armchair. It feels good to sit. It feels solid. “Oh,” she says, and then she says, “Oh!” again, in some surprise.  


“What? What is it?”  


She stands back from the console with her hands on her hips.  


“That’s easy,” she says, “that’s dead easy, that’s not even a one on the Richter scale. Well, metaphorically speaking. Something under the earth’s crust, irritating it, making it heave around to try and get it out. Like when you get a splinter too deep to reach with a needle, and eventually your body will eject it. Like that.”  


“Easy?” he says. “That’s good. What is it?”  


“Zombie dinosaurs,” says the Doctor.  


He blinks.  


“I beg your pardon.”  


“Dinosaurs,” says the Doctor, “that are also zombies. I mean, dead dinos that have been reanimated. I don’t know if there’s a powerful voodoo curse, or if someone’s just been watching too much _Night at the Museum_ , but your four-year-old nephew’s favorite fantasy is about to come true. You humans and your fossil fuels.”  


“What.”  


“It’s alright,” she says gently, “I can fix it. Send it back to sleep. Or set it on fire. No problem.” She taps at a few buttons. “Fancy a trip to the center of the earth?”  


He doesn’t think he does. He thinks he’s stepped into what he thought was a wading pool and found the Pacific Ocean. He thinks when she looks at him like that he feels as though he’s about to be eaten by a shark.  


“Er, ah— no,” he starts, walking backwards a step or two.  


“Too late,” says the Doctor. She springs past him, patting him on the arm as she goes, and darts for the door. She opens it, and the heat is enough to knock him over— but not nearly what it should be, not if they are where she says they are. He has no reason to doubt that they are, considering that they clearly are not where they were a moment ago. No grassy green out there, no collapsed building— just redness, fires, like the heart of a volcano, and something large and black and moving with only the sound of bonecreak, which reminds him uncomfortably of the noises his knees make when he gets out of bed in the morning.  


Redness, fires, bonecreak, and gigantic skeletons walking about in the burning gloom, he can see them as he steps through the door, and he presses his back up against the outside of the box, and stares and stares.  


“Professor,” says the Doctor, who is standing at his side with her arms coolly folded, “you look as though your eyes are going to pop out of your skull.”  


“Well, there’s all these zombie dinosaurs, you see,” he murmurs faintly, “and I— I dressed for, I don’t know, vampiric unicorns or something.”  


She laughs at him, but for once it isn’t unkind.  


“Very good,” she says, approvingly. “That’s very good.”  


“So,” he says. “This is what’s causing the earthquakes.”  


“This is the itch that the earth can’t scratch,” she says, “yes.”  


He knows a little something about itches that can’t be scratched.  


“So what are you going to do?”  


“What’m I going to do? Easy. Set ‘em on fire.” He blinks at her. She laughs a little, that dismissive laugh again, and pats him on the arm till he twitches slightly. She shakes something in her hand, it looks like an unusual bit of tech and makes a little whirring noise. “Exploding them’s the easy bit, that’s just part one. Reanimated dinosaurs are just a symptom. The real question is, what’s causing them?”  


“Okay,” he says, guardedly, “what’s causing them?”  


“No idea,” she says happily. “But I’m going to enjoy finding out. Think I can trace a signal back. Likely to be something originating from space, or maybe the Ice Age. Or maybe the Ice Age in space.” She stops and grins at him for a moment. “Care to come with me and find out?”  


“I— don’t think I— ” _Oh, but don’t be ridiculous, for once in your life_. He licks his lips. “Can I get back to you on that?”  


She shrugs. “Don’t see why not. I suppose you want to get back home for a bit, get your bearings, yeah?”  


“That— would be lovely, yes, thank you very much.”  


Shrugs again. “Easy peasy.”  


“Really?  


“Really.” She shepherds him back into the box and closes the door behind them. He turns toward her and fixes her with his most serious face.  


“If you get me home safely,” he says, “without blowing me up along with all the other dinosaurs, I will— I will buy you some coffee and chips.”  


“Promises, promises,” she says, hums, smiles.  


“Explosions, explosions,” he murmurs back.  


There they are, then, he can hear them outside the box, the ranting, dying wailings of the ranting dying dead, the distant far-off booms, and he can close his eyes and see mushroom clouds.  


“Do you mean to be frowning like that?” she asks him.  


“Probably,” he says, eyes still closed. He’s focusing on his breathing. “Are we home yet?”  


She’s been doing something complicated with the levers, he knows. She stops doing whatever it was she was doing and there’s a sort of thud. It sounds like finality. He wonders what will have changed when he walks outside. Maybe everything. Maybe nothing. He knows what he has his money on.  


“I let them out of the warp hole, by the way,” she says. “Now that we got the dinosaurs sorted.”  


He hesitates. He just isn’t sure how to react to a sentence like that. It isn’t within his normal perview.  


“Ah,” he says. “Good.”  


He stumbles out into the green— just the same— and turns and looks upwards and sure enough, there it is— POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX— also just the same as when he went in. It’s him that’s changed, now. He shakes his head, mouth slightly open, having to remind himself to breathe.  


“That is amazing,” he says. “That is just— that is just bloody _amazing_.”  


“I’m glad you like her,” says the Doctor, closing the door behind her and turning a smile on him. “I mean it. I’m really quite touched.”  


“So that means—”  


“I’m not from Earth.”  


He narrows his eyes at her. “Then what are you doing here? Why are you here?”  


She shrugs. “To help.”  


“Yeah, I got that, I got that. But why? If you’re not from Earth— why are you helping us?”  


She looks away, and smiles at nothing much.  


“I don’t know,” she says. “I like you silly humans, and your silly human ways. I feel— proprietorial. Earth husbandry. I don’t know.”  


He thinks he might be smiling, but it’s really too soon to tell.  


“I don’t know, either,” he says, “but I’m glad.”  


He steps closer to the police box.  


“I remember these, you know,” he says, smoothing a hand over the weathered wood.  


She watches him, and the tenderness in his touch echoes the tenderness in her eyes.  


“So do I,” she says.  


He turns thoughtful. “Doctor,” he says.  


“Professor.”  


“Everyone’s back now. There are people— like, there are people watching us. There are people who watched us come out of the box.”  


“Yes,” she says, and her grin is impish. “Think of the chat round the water cooler in the morning. You’ll be a local hero.”  


That isn’t even really what he should be thinking about, and he knows it. He tries again.  


“You said you put all of them in the wormhole thingy.”  


“Warp hole. Yes.”  


“And you seemed awfully surprised that I was still there.”  


She looks up at him now. “Yes. I was.”  


“So you’d tried to put me in the warp hole, too.”  


Her soft eyes are unfathomable. “Yes. I did.”  


“So why didn’t I go?” he says. “What makes me different?”  


“I don’t know,” she says, honestly. “It’s almost like— you didn’t want to be protected. You wanted to be where the action was. Are you that kind of man, Professor? Do you need to be where the action is?”  


“I don’t know what kind of man I am,” he says, and she is not the only one who is surprised with his honesty. He is so honest, he has to look away from her. “Anyway, they’re all back now.”  


“Ah yes,” she says, and he can hear her smile. “All those impressionable young minds, looking to you for guidance and exemplary conduct.”  


“Just doing my part to get them used to disappointment,” he says, and now he can see the smile, because he’s looking back at her. It makes him want to smile, too. “No use pretending that I am anything other than what I am.”  


She narrows her eyes a little. “Well, what’s wrong with pretending? I won’t hear a word against it.”  


Again he has the sensation that she’s talking about something entirely different than he suspects.  


“Sure,” he says. “Pretending’s— pretending’s great, if you’ve got the knack for it.”  


“Oh, I have,” she assures him. “I pretend things constantly. It’s a hobby. Everyone needs a hobby.”  


“Very true.”  


“So why don’t we pretend?” she says.  


He regards her seriously, eyes hooded. “Pretend— what?”  


“That we’re together,” she says. “Give them a thrill, eh?”  


He’s just about to protest that the prospect of seeing their professor with a much younger woman is unlikely to give his students much of the sort of thrill to which she is referring when she takes a whole double handful of his jacket lapels and pulls him down to her level. It is quite thrilling, if not exactly for the audience which the Doctor has intended. She is enthusiastic, far too enthusiastic about the pretense, much more along the lines of someone who has something to prove— that’s what he thinks, and then realizes that he’s analyzing, and thinks that he shouldn’t be analyzing, he should be kissing, so he refocuses his energies and really starts to settle into it, as awkward and unexpected as it is. She bites on his lip a little; that hasn’t happened in years, apart from when he had that one really vivid dream after he watched _Titanic_ , and that was, what, 1998? He’s analyzing again, he really ought to stop. He’s getting sidetracked. Oh bollocks. What is wrong with him? Her hand slides up his neck and her fingers thread through his hair and he’s thinking of Kate Winslet. He needs to learn to live in the moment, dammit.  


This is going on longer than he expects. His sister would be clocking this at two minutes and counting.  


She lets him go at last, just when he’s on the verge of passing out, or of something even more immediate and embarrassing, and stands before him with that smile. He’s panting, and she’s not even winded.  


“How—” he manages.  


“Oh,” says the Doctor, and waves a hand airily. “Respiratory bypass system. I’ve got the stamina of a much younger woman.”  


“What,” he says, still gasping slightly like a landed fish, “you mean like, the stamina of a fetus? Because you’re incredibly young. I don’t know if you realized that. I hate to keep bringing it up. You’re quite young, and I’m—” He falters. She tilts her head and looks at him curiously. “Not,” he finishes, somewhat lamely.  


“Ah well,” the Doctor sing-songs, and tweaks his nose. “Where are we, by the way?”  


He’s still in recovery mode.  


“Ah,” he says, and has to think about it. Mars seems unlikely. “Glasgow.”  


“Ahhh,” says the Doctor, as though all is explained. “That’ll be the accent then. So.” She smiles at him gently. “You’ve seen what’s inside the planet. How do you feel about a trip to the stars?”  


“Are you sure?” he asks her, earnestly. “I mean, you see me. You could— you could have anyone.”  


“Don’t want anyone,” she says, “want you. But what I want isn’t the only factor here, Professor. I have to ask you, but you have to be the one to say yes. So.” She has a hand on his arm, she has had this whole time, and he hasn’t even noticed. “So,” she says again, gently. “What do you say?”  


“This is what you do,” is what he says. “You travel around and— fix things. Save people.”  


“Doing what I can,” she says. “Just passing through, doing what any old idiot with a screwdriver and a box would do, if they had the chance.”  


If they had the chance.  


“Is it worth it,” he says. “All the travel.”  


She smiles, and gives that same little shrug. “Sometimes it breaks your heart,” she says, with probably the most honesty she’s given him till now. “Sometimes it builds you a new one.”  


So then he smiles, he really smiles, he gives her the first true smile he’s worn in years; since before Diane died, really. He didn’t know he still had those. He must have kept a stockpile somewhere, locked up deep within. He must have been saving them up, because he feels positively wreathed in teeth.  


And she smiles back. She smiles back, that’s the wonder of it. She smiles back, and her eyes are softly shining, and she reaches out and up for his hand. She waits for him to reach back, and he does— out and down— and he wraps his fingers around her hand, her much smaller hand, her quite tiny hand, and he feels the delicate bones, he feels the gravity of her centering his feet on the earth.  


She says, “Are you ready, Professor?”  


And he says, “Let’s go.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I wrote the first part, there wasn't really supposed to be a second part. Then I started writing the second part, and there wasn't supposed to be a third part. Now I've got half of the third part written, and I'm starting to think something has gone horribly, horribly wrong with my life, and I will be spending the rest of it writing fanfic for Whouffaldi. But I can't seem to make myself care. Ah well.

She pulls him into the box and for a dizzy moment he thinks she’s going to kiss him, going to push him up against the door once closed and snog the life out of him. Again. Maybe he’ll actually pay attention this time. But she doesn’t. She only turns sideways into him, shoulder under one side of his coat, and gives him a slightly predatory grin. And he is disappointed, he is so so disappointed, that he adjusts the lapels of his coat with slightly more force than absolutely necessary, snapping them as though they’re wire-threaded. She isn’t paying him the slightest bit of attention, she’s advancing towards the console.

 

“So,” she calls over her shoulder, “coffee and chips?”

“What,” he says, “I thought we were tracing a signal into outer space.”

“Hmm?”

“Zombie dinosaurs,” he reminds her, disbelieving. “Went boom beneath the earth.”

“Oh, yeah, right. That. Well. Time machine. I did tell you that, didn’t I?”

He grits his teeth slightly. “You might have mentioned it, yeah.”

“So why don’t we go for our date first, and then sort it out in the afterglow, yeah?”

His gaze rises from the floor up towards her, very, very slowly. She isn’t even looking at him. She’s looking at the screens, the monitors, and she doesn’t seem to catch what he is thinking, even though he is certain that he is thinking it very, very loudly.

He says, feeling as though something is choking him— perhaps his innate British sensibilities? He did try hard to conquer those when he was younger, but they seem to have caught up with him— “I never—”

“Hmm?” She isn’t even paying him any attention. “Never what? Never had coffee and chips at the same time before?” She gives a little laugh, and shakes her head. “Ridiculous.”

“—on the first date,” he says, painfully aware that there is quite a large gap between the beginning of his sentence and the end of it, and hoping that she will fill it in without any further assistance from him. She makes him feel all pins and needles, and while it is not altogether a pleasant experience, it is not altogether an unpleasant one either, to the point where, though he had originally planned that sentence to read something like, _I never go all the way on the first date_ , if she wanted to understand it as, _I never_ don’t _have sex on the first date_ , then that was okay with him, too. Within reason. She looks as though she has a lot of ideas about things, and while he’s generally in favor of ideas, he doesn’t think he’s up to anything too complex. It was complicated enough, kissing her in front of people and keeping his mind in some semblance of order. He was going all to pieces with her just standing here in front of him.

But she really doesn’t seem to be the slightest bit aware that he’s said anything further at all, and he realizes that this is probably for the best.

“Oh, I suppose,” she says, as though he’s been actively trying to talk her out of their date. She makes a mock grumpy face, or what he thinks is a mock grumpy face— it’s certainly grumpy, and given that she’s spent ninety-nine percent of their time together either smiling or outright laughing, he’s fairly sure she doesn’t really mean it. She holds up the bit of hardware he noticed earlier, and points it at what looks like nothing in particular. Things light up, things go ding, the hardware buzzes enthusiastically. He is turned on for reasons he cannot begin to comprehend. He blinks, and suddenly she is in a different place, across the room and striding towards him.

“Ah!” she says, grinning from ear to ear, “you’re back.”

“Back?”

“Sorry. Just popped you in the warp hole for a moment while I went and had a look round your time line. Make sure all is present and correct.” Is she looking at his trousers? “And it is. Well, I say ‘a moment’ but it’s been— oh—”

“An hour?” he hazards.

“Three days,” she says, “it’s been three days. You may want to change your jumper. You’ve got a bit of drool.”

“You went and— had a look round my time line?”

“Yes.” Her eyes are steady on his, and that’s unnerving, but at least she isn’t looking at drool spots on his jumper.

“Well, that’s— ” He’s not sure what it is.

“Rude?” she supplies for him.

And that’s the trouble, of course, because he rather thinks it is rude, but it isn’t as though there’s an etiquette book that covers this kind of situation and can tell him for sure. So he’s not sure what to say.

So he says, “Nice. That’s— nice.”

“Really?” She narrows her eyes. “I was sure you were going to say ‘rude.’”

“Did you mean for it to be rude?”

“I never mean to be rude,” she says, “well almost never, and I almost invariably am. I don’t know, maybe they just breed them too sensitive on your planet. Or do you think it’s me?”

“It could very well be you,” he allows.

“Aha!” she says, triumphantly. “See, that’s rude, that’s proper rude, right there. Only a Scot can pull that off, eh? The rest of the universe are amateurs. Anyway. Everything seems to be fine, which is lucky for you, Professor, since I’ve already allowed you into the TARDIS.” She looks thoughtful for a moment. “I really must try and remember to do that beforehand. Could be uncomfortable, couldn’t it, if it turned out that the reason your face doesn’t work and you were so eager to help me was because you’re in league with the enemy somehow.”

He draws his eyebrows down thoughtfully. She grabs dramatically onto the console.

“Don’t do that,” she says, “gravity in here’s set at a very delicate balance.”

“In league with the enemy how?” he says. “I don’t even know who they are.”

“Ah, but they could be banking on that,” she says. “You never know with these people.”

“With these people, who?”

“Don’t know,” she says, turning to the screen. “I just said that.”

Surreptitiously he looks for spots on his jumper, only to discover that this is the spotted jumper his sister gave him last Christmas, and everything looks like drool even at the best of times.

“There we go!” she says, triumphantly.

“There we go where?”

“Right here.” She pulls a lever with her left hand, and gives a thoughtful frown. “Or rather— there we go, right here.” She puts the lever back. “Still working out the best way to fly her.”

“You don’t know how to fly your space ship?” he repeats, eyes wide.

“Do you?” she retorts, and this time she puts the lever about halfway pulled, and leaves it there. “Anyway, she’s still getting used to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing. I just changed recently, that’s all.”

He shakes his head a little. “What, you mean, like— your clothes?”

“Well, yeah, but not. My face. Well, whole body really. This one is fresh on.”

“What?”

She drifts a hand up and down to indicate herself, and grins at him, and waggles her eyebrows. “What d’you think?”

“Why would you do that?”

This earns him a pout. “Well, if you’re going to be rude about it—”

“No no no, I mean— why would you change your whole body? How can you change your whole body? How are we even having this conversation?”

“Well,” she says thoughtfully, “the old one was a bit rubbish, I must admit, and it got boring— and I’d been running a lot, so I was going to have to take a long hot shower anyway, and then there was the blood, that made a bit of a mess, so I figured, hell with it, why not just trade it all in on a newer model? I used to be a red head,” she confides. “I don’t really miss that, no point in missing things, but I have to say, I’m a bit disappointed about the height difference.” She stops talking long enough to take in the fact that he hasn’t been able to come up with anything to say for several sentences now, and smiles at him cheekily. “Right, that’s why I usually save that discussion for later on. Sorry. Thought you could handle it.”

“Blood?” he says.

“Got shot,” she says promptly. “Didn’t like it, won’t be going back to _that_ restaurant.”

“Restaurant?”

“Mind you, they did a great omelette. Mmph. Fancy an omelette instead of chips? Or we could go all out. Get an omelette and chips.” She waves a hand airily. “This is your party.”

“Party,” he repeats, distantly.

“Are you just going to stand there repeating everything I say from now on? Because that’s going to get a bit boring for at least one of us, and if that’s the case I’ll drop you back off home right now and save myself the trouble. I won’t want to, mind you, because your facial hair has intrigued me.” He is too busy boggling at her to react much to this. In the face of his obvious confusion, she relents. “Oh, alright, I won’t drop you off after all. I’m willing to make sacrifices in order to keep myself entertained. Come on then. Space? Or chips. Pick one.”

“Space,” he says, though he can hardly credit the word with coming out of his own mouth. He attempts to look disbelievingly at himself, but there isn’t a mirror handy. Probably just as well, he thinks.

“Good,” she says, with a decisive nod. “That puts an end to that argument.”

“Are we— are we having an argument?” He hasn’t noticed, if they are.

“Teething troubles,” she says dismissively. “Don’t be bothered. I always have teething troubles when I pick up a new one. It’s my general air of mystery. It puts people on edge.”

He’s definitely on edge, so he can’t exactly argue with that, though it isn’t so much her general air of mystery as the fact that her space ship, time ship, her whatever ship— Time and Realistic Directions in Space? What? Sounds like some sort of avant garde garage band, gives him trench flashbacks to being in one himself whilst in his teens— is lurching around him, and he’s spinning more or less inaccurately in her direction, and she’s put an arm about his arm and pinned him to the console with surprising force for someone so vertically challenged.

“Here we are then,” she says— laughing, of course, she never seems to do anything else— and she squeezes his arm for a moment with her other hand, just a quick pressure of her fingers, enough to make him think that she’s letting him know she can get to him, if she wants to; so no funny business. Except he’s not entirely sure that’s the message he’s meant to be receiving. Whatever she’s trying to say, he’s enthralled; she can definitely get to him. He won’t even mind.

Also, they’re in space.

She tugs him over to the double doors and flings them open, and he flinches from the onslaught of the light. The light which, it turns out, is as natural as it gets; it’s the light of the planet, reflecting the glow of the sun, and as he adjusts and as he stares, he wonders why no one has ever reported that the earth pulses like lifeblood is flowing just beneath it; it breathes. Astronauts. Not doing their jobs. Astro-nots. Useless. Astronaughts. He stares and stares and stares.

He thinks he hears a, “Wow,” come dribbling out of his mouth.

The Doctor is watching him with a kind of pride in her eyes, as though she’s put this whole thing together just for his benefit and is presenting him with the earth, as a particularly shiny Christmas gift. Her arms are folded and she leans against the doorway. She has an insouciant lean, but he suspects that she has practiced it.

“Pretty, isn’t it?”

He makes another effort at, “Wow,” and is marginally more successful. She dips her head and laughs a little.

“This is why,” she says. “This is why I help. I’ve sort of adopted you, I suppose. I like planets. I like the people on them. Well, the people, and the things, and the things that are also people. I saw a series of photographs once. The most beautiful planets you ever saw— oh, dramatic, barren, a bit stark, but lovely. Bit like your face, if you don’t mind me saying so. Made me want them. Almost yearn for them.” He does manage to look at her, at that, but he can’t really summon up an appropriate response. None seems to be required. She’s looking out at the earth, hanging there below them. “Turned out to be photographs of the bottoms of frying pans. Oh, was I mad.” She swallows. “But here’s the earth. Have you ever seen anything more beautiful in your life?”

“No,” he says, and he’s truthful.

“Neither have I,” says the Doctor, “and that’s sayin’ something.” She pushes away from the doors, and stands up straight again. The bit of tech is in her hand, and she sweeps it apparently aimlessly back and forth in the middle distance before them.

 

“There they are,” she says, and he can make out a spot, quite a long ways away— it appears— but he can’t make out any details. Even if he squints, which he does, though he’s aware that this action causes his eyebrows to look as though they are actively conquering his face, like Alexander the Great.

“Who are they?”

“Can’t tell yet.”

“Well, what do they want?”

“Oh, I imagine they were trying to take over the earth. Ninety-nine percent of the time, that’s the case. Well, seventy-five percent, anyway.”

“Via zombie dinosaurs?” he murmurs, and she nods.

“Fair point,” she says. “Makes you think they don’t really know what they’re about, doesn’t it? Strictly amateur hour. I’ve seen better attempts from the Paxavillians of Wentwhistle Five, and they’re strict pacifists without any limbs who spend most of their lives in small dark rooms.” She points the tech at them again, and it buzzes. “Right,” she says, in some satisfaction, “that’s them sorted for the moment.”

“What? Really?”

“Sure, why not?”

“All you did was point that— thing at them.”

“Sonic screwdriver,” she says, waving it at him now to demonstrate, as though she’s introducing the two of them. “It has numerous applications. I’d tell you how many but I’m not even sure. I keep adding more functions in my sleep. Let no one tell you that sleep-tinkering isn’t dangerous. I’ve set my dressing gown on fire more times than I care to count.”

“Ought to have someone watching you.”

“Tried. I kept setting them on fire, too.”

He’s very suddenly made aware of the fact that they are not, as he had previously supposed, as far away from the spot she’s been pointing at as he had thought. And the movement of the earth below him, while distracting and very breathtaking, was not simply the turn of middle-sized planet on its axis. Rather, the facts were that the time-and-whatever ship had been hurtling towards the distant spot since the Doctor had first pointed at it, and they were coming up on it with a rapidity that verged on the sickening. He shrank away from the door, only to feel her hand on his arm, like steel, holding him in place.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” she says, softly. “Stay put, Professor. We’re not nearly done yet.”


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“First,” says the Doctor, squinting slightly into the distance, “we are going to crash onto their space ship.”_
> 
> _His eyebrows shoot upwards, clearly alarmed. The rest of his face isn’t feeling too great about things, either._
> 
> _“Do we have to do that,” he says, “can’t we land delicately.”_

For a terrible, terrifying moment, he doesn’t mind not being done. He thinks it would be okay, really, to never be done, to be standing here at the edge of the darkness of space with her clutching on to his lapel— as though she doesn’t want him to go— forever, hurtling on to whatever comes next. But the fact of the matter is that they are hurtling on to an alien space ship that is growing ever more enormous as they approach, and she is in all probability clutching on to him, not because of her desire for his company, but because there is a very real danger of him falling. _Oh, reality. Stop raining on my parade_ , he thinks at it, slightly bitterly.

 

“Can they see us coming?”

“For miles away,” she assures him.

“Why don’t they just leave?”

She waggles the bit of tech in the air in front of him. “Stopped them. They aren’t going anywhere till I say so.”

He focuses on the tech so completely that his eyes cross. “You can do that?”

“I can do anything,” she says, with confidence so absolute that he thinks she should bottle it and end the depression epidemic. He doesn’t say so, though, because he suspects that she doesn’t need her ego stroked. It isn’t that he minds terribly stroking egos, but there are quite frankly other things he would rather be stroking, and he feels as though he can’t move, and therefore, better just to leave off entirely.

“So what are you going to do now?” he says. “Since you can do anything.”

The grin she turns on him is a bit manic.

“What we came for,” she says. “Save the world.”

“I’m sorry, I thought we did that when we blew up the zombie dinosaurs,” he says, blinking rapidly.

“Temporarily.” She wags a finger at him. “Are you satisfied with temporarily saving the world? ‘Cuz it feels a bit unfinished, to me.”

“Okay, so.” He shrugs. “Details?”

“First,” says the Doctor, squinting slightly into the distance, “we are going to crash onto their space ship.”

His eyebrows shoot upwards, clearly alarmed. The rest of his face isn’t feeling too great about things, either.

“Do we have to do that,” he says, “can’t we land delicately.”

“S’pose we could,” says the Doctor, and leans out the door with that same wolfish grin on her face. “But that’s not really my style.”

Which is pretty much all the warning he gets before they—

—presumably crash, he thinks, waking up in a strange place. He sits up quite suddenly, which is a bit of a mistake. His head throbs.

“I am not cut out for this,” he says. But no one and nothing is listening to him, and so, therefore, he shuts up. He isn’t in the habit of talking to himself; at least, not out loud, though the running monologue inside his head suggests otherwise. He is a wordy soul. He enunciates and he slurs and he is didactic, and meanwhile, while he’s telling himself this, somewhat muzzedly, things are happening. Big things. Loud things. The Doctor is involved, because of course she is. Would he have ever expected anything different?

He expects nothing, where she is concerned. No doubt she’s been busy saving the world. Again. It’s a habit she seems to like, and one he can’t help but approve of. Not saving the world would be so old hat after this, he thinks. How is he going to go back to his students and his café cart and the book on Cardinal Richelieu that for him constitutes light bedtime reading after this?

He is wearing handcuffs, which throws him for a moment.

But only a moment. He recovers. It’s dark, wherever he is, and he thinks he’s probably alone. The noises are outside— outside of what, he can’t tell, because of the aforementioned darkness. He struggles to his feet, relieved to find a helping wall at his side, and then somewhat less relieved to find that the door in the wall was shut, and shut firmly. His hands are cuffed in front of him, so he makes fists of them and bangs against the door. The noises outside cease, and the dark grows watchful. He catches his breath, and swallows.

There’s a buzzing noise in his coat pocket, and the Doctor’s voice comes through, muzzily, unclear, with a slight mechanical timbre to it.

“Professor.”

He fumbles at his pocket, but he can’t get whatever it is out, not with his hands bound like they are. Hoping there isn’t a button he needs to press or something, he says, “I’m here. Wherever here is. I mean, I haven’t the faintest idea, it’s all dark, but there I am anyway.”

She says, “They took you away.”

He says, “I’m alright. I think.” He does wonder how this happened, though. Was she not paying enough attention? Did she think she had maybe left him in the wormhole? Did she straight-up forget that he existed to begin with?

She says, “I’m coming to get you.”

He’s feeling over the walls in the darkness, slapping the flat of his palms against them experimentally. They’re thick, though he can’t tell what exactly they’re made of; they feel a bit like stone, a bit like concrete, and they exude a slow and seeping warmth that he doesn’t like. As though something is living inside of them, or as though they are living themselves. He wouldn’t be at all surprised to feel a heart beat.

But he can’t hear anything so faint and subtle, because the explosions have resumed. And they seem to be getting closer, which he realizes should worry him— he really does, he is quite aware that somewhere in some alternate universe he is very, very worried indeed— but right now all he can think is, She is coming to get me, and alongside that is a very logical, very rational little sentence that says, If she keeps exploding things, I am probably going to die. It is a very small room.

So he says, “Wait, wait wait,” and his voice only sounds a little frantic. Hardly frantic at all, really, for which he congratulates himself. The explosions halt, they cease, they settle on an uneasy pause.

“What is it?” comes her voice, concerned.

“Small room,” he says. “Please don’t blow me to bits. Keys would be best.”

“They don’t have keys,” she says.

“Did you ask?”

“I didn’t hear any pinging noises.”

He thinks he knows what she means by that, and searches the ceiling that he can’t see while he thinks about it. “How about this,” he says.

“How about, I’m fine here, moderately comfortable, you get it all sorted out without blowing everything up and then come and get me. If I haven’t figured out how to escape on my own. Okay?”

“Moderately comfortable,” she repeats.

He shrugs, helplessly.

“That’s all I can offer you, really,” he says. “If I was in a position to negotiate, I’d ask for a pillow and a cuppa, but in the meantime—”

“In the meantime,” she says, and her voice crackles out, fizzing and sparking, and the little communicator she must have slipped into his pocket makes an odd little jumping motion. He looks down at it— pointlessly— and listens. The explosions have stopped, still in that uneasy holding pattern. He thinks he should probably figure out a way to escape on his own. Just in case. Though, the end result can only be that he will be loose on a space ship high above the earth. That seems not much better than trapped in a space ship high above the earth— trapped either way, really— but on the faint hope that he might be of some use—

He goes to his knees in front of what seems to be, what he hopes is, what must be the door, and puts his head against the ground. Down here, with the explosions in the distance finally having echoed themselves into silence, he can hear what he has thought he would be able to: a steady thrum, a one-two beat, a giant hollow heart making itself heard. He wonders if it affects the tides. He doesn’t know why, but he thinks it might. He reaches forward.

There is a gap under the door, a decent-sized one, and he laughs, a breathless sound, because he has always been told he should fatten himself up a little, could stand to put on a little weight, looks like a stiff wind would blow him over— but would he be able to do _this_?

There’s a distinctly uncomfortable moment when he thinks he’s stuck, and thinks what an ignominious way this would be to die, but he exhales every bit of oxygen he’s ever even thought of inhaling, and slides himself through centimeter by centimeter, and the worst bit is his boots, oddly enough, he can’t seem to get them through; so he catches his ankles at just the right angle to twist his feet together and toe them off, and then he’s free, he’s free, and he hasn’t even been exploded. A definite plus. He pads his way almost silently through the dimly-lit corridor, feeling the heart-thrum now on the soles of his feet.

The Doctor is holding court in a room at the center of the ship; she is bloodied and glorious, and her hair falls over her shoulders in a way that makes him think there is a reason for fingers, and her eyes are full of spit and fire and venom and other worrisome things. She looks relieved when she sees him, though, and this is a little worrisome, too.

“Ah,” she says, “good. I was beginning to wonder.”

There are bodies all around her. He wonders if they’re dead. He doesn’t think they are; he doesn’t think she would do that. But he is aware, at the same time, that their relationship has been limited in the extreme. Limited by the time, limited by experience, limited by what she has chosen to show him. And he can’t be sure. Short of going to each and every one and feeling for a pulse, he can never, ever be sure.

He swallows.

“What can I do?” he says. He doesn’t feel in the mood for banter, suddenly.

There is one of the aliens upright still, standing in front of her, and its hands— its hand-like appendages, at any rate— are lifted in what looks, to him, like a gesture of surrender. They are squat and wide and thick, which may explain why the gap at the bottom of the door wasn’t such a big deal— or maybe it wasn’t designed to hold anyone, to begin with— and the features of the face appear to be sliding off the front of the skull, and making a break for it to start a new life on the left shoulder.

“Nothing, now,” says the Doctor. “You’ve been very useful in letting yourself out of whatever you were stuck in. So now we can go.”

The alien is still very watchful, as though it doesn’t quite trust her. He knows how it feels, and sympathizes heartily.

“Er,” he says. “Really?”

“Oh, sure,” says the Doctor. “I think they’ve learnt their lesson, don’t you?” She turns to him with a ready smile. “No more trying to take over innocent planets for their own gain. No more threatening the lives of billions of beings just coz they want something. No more.” But she goes very still, all of a sudden, and her enormous eyes are no longer soft, they are hard and fixed as though she’s sculpted, as though she has been sculpted thousands of years ago by an unknown hand. She turns back. “Unless they haven’t. In which case.”

Her hand is frozen, lifted, and she holds the bit of tech loosely in her grip, as though it is of no consequence to her whether she is forced to use it or not; but her thumb hovers over the button.

“Point and think,” she says. “That’s how it works. That’s all it takes.”

He says, “Wait.” She lifts an eyebrow, just barely, and her chin wavers, but she doesn’t even look at him.

“I don’t want to wait.”

“But you should,” he says.

“Why.”

He swallows, hard, and reaches for her. He rests his hand on her upper arm, very lightly, and tells her, while he touches her, “The ship is alive.” Her mouth moves at that, but she says nothing. “I can feel it,” he says. “When I was locked up. I could feel the heart beat.”

“You,” she says to the alien creature with the slippery face. “What is this ship?”

The alien creature with the slippery face dithers for a moment, and he thinks, Fear. That is fear in its eyes. Fear of losing? Fear of loss. Which is not the same thing.

“Mother,” it says.

“Your mother,” says the Doctor.

“Master,” says the creature.

The Doctor pulls in a deep breath and huffs it out again, and drops her arm to her side. “Mother and master.”

“What does that mean?” he asks her, eyes keen and narrow, watching her face.

“It isn’t them,” she says. “At least, I don’t think it is. If the ship is their mother and their master, it’s the ship who’s deciding where to go, what to do. The ship wants to be powered— the Earth can provide that power. Abracadabra, zombie dinosaurs.”

“How do you know he’s not just fooling you?”

The Doctor flings an arm out to gesture to the creature, and snorts a little. “Look at him. Does he look capable of fooling me?”

He has to admit, when it came to the two of them, his money is on the Doctor.

“Okay, well. What are you going to do?”

“What am I going to do?” she echoes, turning to him now. “Well, you tell me, Professor. What would you do, in my situation? Say you’re faced with this decision. What do you do?”

He swallows nervously, and looks at the creatures.

“What are we capable of?”

She smiles faintly, though he isn’t sure what at. Him, probably.

“Any number of things,” she says. “Keeping in mind that they tried to kill us—”

“They didn’t try to kill us, though, did they? If anything, the ship did.”

“So,” she coaches him, tilting her head to one side and tapping the bit of tech against her chin, “should they be punished for something the ship did?”

“Why should they be?” he says, brow furrowed, and she relaxes into a smile. A positively beaming smile.

“There you have it,” she says, turning to the creature. “Simple as that. Why should we punish you? So what do we do instead, Professor?”

“Can we override the ship’s command?”

“We can do that, sure,” she says, nodding deeply. “We can do them one better, too. We can take them away and put them on a ship that doesn’t try to make them kill people and take one perfectly good companion away from another and lock them up with handcuffs on. We can give them another chance to start over.”

But the creature is shaking its head, short little jerks of negation, and he hesitates, then puts a hand on the Doctor’s elbow and tugs her with him, gently, out of ear shot.

“I don’t think they want to leave her,” he says.

“Who? The ship?”

“You heard him. He called it Mother. No one wants to leave their mum, not really.”

“But it isn’t,” she says. “It’s a ship.”

He narrows his eyes at her. “You seem quite attached to your blue box,” he says. “How would you feel if someone tried to put you in an American phone booth instead? All plastic walls and graffiti.”

“The TARDIS isn’t attempting to explode random planets for her own gain.”

“But what if she did?”

“Then I would fix whatever had gone drastically wrong with her programming.”

“So,” he prompts, gently. “You’re a genius, aren’t you? Can’t you do that for them? Do the same thing?”

She looks up into his face, searching his eyes, for a long moment, before she smiles at him again. But her mouth is harder this time, as though she doesn’t quite mean it, or as though she means it in a different way. He doesn’t quite comprehend what the meaning is.

“Alright,” she says. “I’ll tell you what. I know a shipyard that specializes in confrontational therapy. They’ve got a droid there who knows his way around belligerent computers like you would not believe, and they’re quite reasonably priced, for therapists. Shall we tow them there, and let them do their worst? I warn you, none of them will ever be quite the same, more than likely, but they’ll be together. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“That’s what they want,” he says. “And that’s a bit more important.”

“Ah, don’t sell yourself short, Professor,” she says, and tugs on his coat sleeve. 

“Er,” he says, hopefully, and holds up his bound wrists. Her mouth twists in a dangerous smile and for a moment he’s afraid she’s going to refuse, but then she whirrs the bit of tech at him and he is released.

“Good job they weren’t wooden,” she said. “Or you’d have been stuck for good.”

“I— probably could have got them off myself, if they had been.”

“Ah,” she says, with a brief flash of disappointment. But she’s proud of him, for escaping, for keeping himself together, for taking initiative. For not dying, probably. For taking in her dangerousness, and not running the opposite direction. For a simple solution to a complicated problem.

Or maybe she’s not proud of him at all; he can feel something like self-doubt riding on his Adam’s apple, bobbing its head up and down in a series of affirmative nods. Though what it is affirming, he has no idea. What is there to say yes to, in this situation?

Yes to climbing back aboard her blue box, it seems.

Yes to scooping up the alien ship in a tractor beam, like a stone in the palm, and hauling it off to where she wants to take it. She doesn’t ask permission, he notices. He thinks permission is probably not something she deals with much, on a regular basis.

Behind them, the unconscious aliens are stirring back to life. He’s glad he doesn’t have to play doctor to them. He thinks he’d be rubbish at it.

They watch on the scanner as they approach the shipyard that specializes in confrontational therapy.

“And that’s it,” he says.

She shrugs lightly. “Easy. Mystery solved. No muss, no fuss. Well, not for us to have to clean up, at any rate.”

“But,” he says, “I thought—”

“Hmm?” She is barely, if at all, paying him any attention.

“What about my face?”

“What about your face?”

He gestures to it. “It doesn’t work properly.”

She leans back and puts a hand on her hip. “Well, it stays attached to the front of your skull instead of sliding around like some people I could mention, so that’s a plus to start with.”

“But— shouldn’t there be more?”

“Oh, yes,” murmurs the Doctor. “There should always be more.”

She’s poking at levers and buttons, and he isn’t. He’s just— standing. There’s a certain amount of comfort in just standing, he finds. Just having his feet solid and flat, even if the ground beneath them is the inside of a blue box space ship, in which he is unexpectedly having adventures. His feet are still bare; he never recovered his shoes. He wiggles his toes on the grating. She looks up at him sharply.

“Why are you doing that?”

He isn’t aware that he’s doing much of anything. But that turns out to be what she means.

“Just looking,” she says, waving a hand up and down at him. “You don’t need to be just looking. You can— you know how you can be friends with someone and feel like you’re on the edge of something else all the time? Maybe the edge of enemies, with someone you don’t really actually like very much, and with friends you do— you look at them and wonder, what if I went up to them and did what I’m thinking of doing? How would we change? What if I went up to them and— killed them?”

This startles him, obviously, and she stifles a laugh.

“Well, I imagine that would be an end to the friendship, for starters.”

“Something less drastic, then. What if I told them what I really think of their haircut? Or their ridiculous trousers? What if I told them how they’re the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time? Oh, a million things, Professor. We’re all on the edge. But you don’t have to stare and wonder with me. Do what you like.”

“Really?”

“Of course,” she says, matter of factly. She shrugs. “I always do, so I’d be a hypocrite if I asked anything else.”

“Can you do that? Can you get away with that?”

“Get slapped every now and then,” she says cheerfully, “but haven’t lost any limbs yet.”

He shakes his head a bit, in what has passed disbelief and is moving rapidly towards an undignified acceptance.

“Are you like this with everyone?”

“Like what?”

“Flirty,” he says, and the word feels wrong, tastes wrong, is wrong, for what she is, but he doesn’t know how else to say it. “Invading people’s personal space.” He doesn’t want to keep talking but he doesn’t seem to be able to stop, either.

“I’m sorry,” she purrs, in a manner that suggests the exact opposite. “I thought you liked it.”

And— he does, but that isn’t the issue. He tries to move on from that. He can’t remember exactly what the issue is. Something about staring and wondering. Or wondering and staring. Something like that.

“And you always travel with a companion?”

“Most of the time,” she says, and nods. “Easier to get out of trouble, with two. Well. Easier to get into it, too, but hey, who’s keeping track of that.”

“You need someone,” he says, realizing. She quirks an eyebrow at him. It isn’t as impressive as his eyebrows, he has to admit, but it’s probably the thought that counts.

“Need?” she says. “Me?”

“To stop you, when you need stopping. To start you, when you need starting. To ground you.”

The Doctor lifts her face to the skies. “I like to fly.”

“To fly with you, then,” he says, softly. Then, “But not me.”

He’s turned away from her. It’s easier, he thinks.

“Are you rejecting me?” says the Doctor. She sounds a bit bewildered, as though this doesn’t happen very often. And he suspects it doesn’t. Hell, he knows it doesn’t, as surely as though he’s been there, watching her through the hundreds of years, hundreds of years of tiny humans, one after another, she asks, they say, Yes. Of course they say yes. She is wonderful and terrifying and beautiful and and and. He doesn’t know the words for what she is. He doesn’t speak the language for what she is.

He regrets what he has said, with an intensity that he has not felt for a long, long while. Not since Diana was lowered into the ground, and he put the first handful of dirt on the box. He’s always had a strange feeling about boxes; the things you put in them. Some things you want remember, and some things you want so badly to forget.

He thinks about putting himself in a box.

“Yes,” he says. “No. I don’t know.”

“Professor,” she says, “I don’t say this very often, but. You’re confusing me.”

“Don’t you miss us?” It isn’t what he wants to ask, but it’s what comes out of his mouth while he isn’t looking at her. If he had been looking at her, it probably would have transmogrified into a confession of undying devotion, but without her there, it’s a little easier to say things he doesn’t really mean.

“Miss you,” she says. “Miss you.”

“When you lose us,” he says. “When we get too— too old, or too— close.” Because of course she can’t stay with everyone. Of course everyone can’t stay with her. It hurts him just to think of it. How much pain can one being stand, even one as complicated and impressive as the Doctor?

“You mean love,” she says. “You think I can’t fall in love with my companion, because it will hurt when they leave me.”

“Doesn’t it?” he asks her quietly. She smiles, and it’s a sad smile, and he can feel it, he can identify it, he thinks it might be something that belonged to him, once.

“Love,” she says. “Whether it goes silent and speechless or you cry it aloud, it means the same: pain. It hurts the same, whether you name it or not. And tell me. Is that any reason why I shouldn’t? I’m not afraid of hurting. I am afraid of living without love.”

He’s quiet for a moment. “You’re a braver soul than me,” he says. But she has no time, no patience for his confessions.

“And of course I lose people, and of course it hurts. But what do you want me to do, when you have to go home because of some geriatric emergency,” emphatic gesturing, “or dying or whatever? Do you expect me to just stop?”

“No,” he says, softly, hands still on hers. “No, you should never, ever stop.”

Her hands move up to cover her eyes, and her shoulders heave a little bit.

“But,” he says, still searching this out, still unsure what he means by all of this— “Perhaps you want to find someone who’s a bit more worth your investment.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Someone young. Someone who will be— _worth_ your caring for them.”

“In comparison, you _are_ young.”

“I’m fifty six.”

“And I’m over two thousand years old,” she says, “but who’s counting. And yes, you’re right, Professor. If you’re a person who is more concerned about what people might think, looking at the two of us, then you’re right. I don’t want you.” She comes closer to him, eyes like gimlets. “So the question is. What sort of a man are you, Professor?”

“I— don’t know.”

“You’d better find out, right quick. Or you will lose me forever, I will go away with my box and we will not come back. My good opinion, once lost, is lost forever.”

He blinks at that.

“Did you— just quote Jane Austen at me?”

“I did,” she says steadily, “and that makes you Lizzie Bennet, Professor, so what do you make of that?”

He chews on the inside of his cheek for a moment, then holds a hand out to her.

“Will you dance with me, Mr. Darcy?”

They don’t dance, not just then— that comes later. But they do stand for a moment, while she looks at him till she can make out the fear and the pain and the fear of the pain in his eyes, and then she smiles. She smiles, and she takes his hand.

“Teach me a thing or two, Professor,” she says.

So he does what he wants. He does what he’s been thinking of, while he’s been staring and wondering at her. He leans down and kisses her, and she lets him. More than lets him, to be exact. To be exact, she kisses him back, she’s open and warm and a little sloppy, a little messy, so he feels like she’s taken the breath from him, each breath individually until it amounts to the oxygen he’d counted on for the next six months, he’s going to have to do something about that, get a tank or something, and she cups his face in her hands and strokes his jawline with her thumb and coaxes more out of him, far more than he ever thought he could give, far more than he ever thought he’d had to begin with.

He gets the story— later, much later, around the time of the dancing— on what had happened while he was passed out, in the initial crash on the ship. He had done a wonderful slow crashing trick himself, she tells him, sideways into the wall, and gravity had taken its toll.

“Well, why didn’t you help me?” he grumps at her.

“Oh,” she assures him, “a fall is too beautiful of a thing to break.” 

It’s a wonderful story. The words of it lick at his skin with truth, make him smile like firelight, and he thinks fondly to himself. If he had known this morning what he knew now—

He might not have left the house, honestly. Things are dangerous, outside. Things move and breathe and attack and create emotions. Things are alive, and things hurt. He can’t help but be glad.

The Doctor guides her blue box upwards, outwards, flying, with both hands on the controls and her eyes on him. Not looking forward, and never looking back; but he’s there, at her side, and she smiles.

“Where to next?” she says.

He wonders briefly if there is some sort of map to consult. He doesn’t know what the answer is. He has no idea what words are going to escape him next.

He takes in a deep breath. He closes his eyes, and concentrates. He opens his mouth.

“Umm,” he says, so she laughs, and she takes him, unasked, on the adventure of a lifetime.


End file.
